How does the neoliberal city look? How is it changing in the present systemic crisis? How to design an alternative city?

Cities have become the key arenas of a primarily market-driven globalization process. They are widely regarded as something “non-plannable”, which can be observed but only barely influenced, let alone designed. Following this perspective social conflict and protest are replaced with techniques that promote unanimity and consensus. Particularly in the urban context, this leads to a post-political situation, in which spaces of democratic engagement are swallowed up.

“Design for the Post-Neoliberal City” invites international researchers and practitioners from a range of disciplines to critically investigate the neoliberal city’s production of urban spaces and its impact on everyday life. Particular attention will be paid to the question how the current global economic crisis serves to accelerate or modify these tendencies. In conclusion, discussion will turn to how the crisis of neoliberal ideology may simultaneously be an opportunity to imagine urban concepts which exceed the primacy of the economic manoeuvres.

From being strategic places for the implementation of neoliberal policy, cities may possibly become a new political arena for experiments in democracy – and in return require a new design. But designers continue to hold back with criticism and proposals. Yet the time has come, to redefine the role of design in a social city – and to take action. “Design for the Post-Neoliberal City” will posit the basic principles and points of departure of a search for an alternative urban design practice, beyond the practices and ideology of crisis-ridden, late-capitalist urbanism. For it is precisely in the field of design, which has hitherto taken only a cautious approach to urban issues, that one finds unexplored potential for an intentional (re-)design of space.

A new design for the city is urgently needed: for, by its very nature, a city cannot be anything but designed. It is socially produced.